Sam Harris Interview (Part 4)

The fourth installment of the group interview organized by The Raving Atheist:

Atheist bloggers Brian Flemming and Under No Circumstances continue the questioning of End of Faith author Sam Harris on the merits of meditational mysticism. Parts 1, 2 and 3 can be found respectively here, here and here.

BRIAN FLEMMING: But Tiger Woods can demonstrate his skill for me without my joining his cult. I can see what he's good at. No leap of faith is required before I become a fan. And I can understand and appreciate Feynman's work without making myself vulnerable to his cult in any way. Meditation seems unique to me in that in order to understand its benefits, one has to turn over one's mind to it, generally under the guidance of an authority. "What I have to sell you is wonderful, but you have to buy it to know why," is a very familiar pitch.

HARRIS: Granted the skill of meditation is not as demonstrable as hitting a golf ball. But there are certainly signs of expertise. The people who I've met who have been considered masters of meditation -- mostly old, Tibetan lamas who have spent 10 or 20 years on retreat -- have been extraordinary people. Had they been ordinary neurotics, I can assure you that no one would have been interested in what they had to say about the nature of human happiness. Neuroimaging studies on accomplished meditators has also revealed clear, reproducible, and functionally significant changes in neural activity, especially in the frontal lobes. (See, in particular, the work of Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin.)

But that said, your fear of buying a pig in a poke does not seem warranted to me. Most things that are worth looking into in a deep way, require some considerable commitment of time an energy. "What I have to sell you is wonderful, but you have to buy it to know why," is also true of physics -- in the sense that a person has to make a massive down-payment of effort in order to equip himself with theconceptual tools to even know what physicists are talking about. In fact, physics is even less egalitarian than that. The true pitch from theoretical physics is: "What I have to sell you is wonderful, but it would take you years to understand it, provided that you are smart enough. And you probably aren't smart enough." Starting from zero, an ordinary person could spend the rest of his life trying to find out if string-theory makes any sense. Needless to say, his failure to do so would say nothing at all about the merits of string-theory.

With meditation, however, you can get your foot in the door far more easily. Almost any person who sits a week-long meditation retreat, with the proper guidance, will get a taste of what is being talked about, and then will be in a position to judge for himself whether there is a "there" there. I share your concern about cults, but cults are the extreme case of spiritual discourse gone awry. Judging the merits of meditation on the basis of cults is like judging the scientific method merely by looking at examples of scientific misconduct.

The only faith required here is the faith of scientific hypothesis. The hypothesis is this: if I use my attention in a certain way, it will have a specific, reproducible effect. Needless to say, what happens (or fails to happen) must be interpreted in light of some rational scheme, and everything is open to argument. But there is really no basis for a swindle. If there is no pay off in a reasonable period of time, a person can simply move on to another project -- like golf.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES: In recent years, several experimental studies have been designed to test whether artificial elevation of activity in certain brain regions can generate spiritual experiences. Virtually all such studies have found this to be possible, though with varying results depending on the method of stimulation and the regions selected. Though these studies are obviously still only scratching the surface, it is easy to see the profound implications they could have for meditation and prayer (as well as spirituality in general) and the consciousness/brain relationship. If it were possible to artificially induce brain conditions identical to those achieved through normal meditation, would you expect the meditative experience to differ? In other words, if the physical brain is made to precisely imitate the natural meditative state, would there still be some extra-neurological component missing?

HARRIS: I do not doubt that the contents of consciousness are entirely dependent on states of the brain. Which is to say that if one could artificially impose the right brain state on a person, there is every reason to expect that he would have the right mental state as well. Of course, the results of such an experiment would say little about the relationship between consciousness itself and the brain. In fact, results of this sort would even be compatible with certain forms of dualism. If brains are just receivers of consciousness, one might still expect changes in the contents of consciousness to supervene upon changes in neural activity. But such an idea requires that one distinguish between consciousness and its contents, which is a move that many philosophers and scientists find suspect. In any case, I think we should be very interested in the possibility of inducing normative states of the brain. But it's not going to happen any time soon.

UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES: The technique of bio-feedback is currently used to help humans learn to consciously control their own brain patterns or physiological states, and could have great potential for use in training humans to induce meditative brain chemistry or electrical activity. How would you say that would compare to more traditional methods of teaching meditation? Would the attention to raw, neurological data detract from the consciousness-dependent "mental" activity, or would it merely be another way of learning the necessary discipline and focus? Is experiencing the ultimate meditative state the goal in and of itself, or is it essential to use a specific process for arriving at that state?